Thursday, 16 June 2016

NATO adds cyberattack to "collective defence"provision

NATO
Says It Might Now Have Grounds to Attack Russia

On
Tuesday, June 14th, NATO
announced that
if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by
persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s
Article V“collective
defense” provision requires
each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it
decides to strike back against the attacking country. The preliminary
decision for this was made two years ago after Crimea abandoned
Ukraine and rejoined Russia, of which it had been a part until
involuntarily transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet dictator Nikita
Khrushchev in 1954. That NATO decision was made in anticipation of
Ukraine’s ultimately becoming a NATO member country, which still
hasn’t happened. However, only now is NATO declaring cyber war
itself to be included as real “war” under the NATO Treaty’s
“collective defense” provision.

NATO
is now alleging that because Russian
hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer,
this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having
privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured
home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the U.S.
State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a
Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if
the U.S. President declares it to be a
Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause
and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in
going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.

NATO
had produced in 2013 (prior to the take-over
of Ukraine)
an informational propaganda video alleging
that “cyberattacks” by people in Russia or in China that can
compromise U.S. national security, could spark an invasion by NATO,
if the U.S. President decides that the cyberattack was a hostile act
by the Russian or Chinese government. In the video, a British
national-security expert notes that this would be an “eminently
political decison” for the U.S. President to make, which can be
made only by the U.S. President, and which only that person possesses
the legal authority to make. NATO, by producing this video, made
clear that any NATO-member nation’s leader who can claim that his
or her nation has been ‘attacked’ by Russia, possesses the power
to initiate a NATO war against Russia. In the current instance, it
would be U.S. President Barack Obama. However, this video also said
that NATO could not automatically accept such a head-of-state’s
allegation calling the cyber-attack an invasion, but instead the
country that’s being alleged to have perpetrated the attack would
have to have claimed, or else been proven, to have carried it out.
With the new NATO policy, which was announced on June 14th, in which
a cyber-attack qualifies automatically as constituting “war” just
like any traditional attack, such a claim or proof of the
target-nation’s guilt might no longer be necessary. But this has
been left vague in the published news reports about it.

In
the context of the June 14th NATO announcement that cyberwar is on
the same status as physical war, Obama might declare the U.S. to have
been invaded by Russia when former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s State Department emails were copied by someone in Russia.

It’s
a hot issue now between Russia and the United States, and so, for
example, on the same day, June 14th, Reuters headlined “Moscow
denies Russian involvement in U.S. DNC hacking”,
and reported that, “Russia on Tuesday denied involvement in the
hacking of the Democratic National Committee database that U.S.
sources said gained access to all opposition research on Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

In
previous times, espionage was treated as being part of warfare, and,
after revelations became public that the U.S. was listening in on the
phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, espionage has
become recognized as being simply a part of routine diplomacy (at
least for the United States); but, now, under the new NATO policy, it
might be treated as being equivalent to a physical invasion by an
enemy nation.

At
the upcoming July 8th-9th NATO Summit meeting, which will be
happening in the context of NATO’s biggest-ever military exercises
on and near the borders of Russia, called “Atlantic
Resolve”,
prospective NATO plans to invade Russia might be discussed in order
to arrive at a consensus plan for the entire alliance. However, even
if that happens, it wouldn’t be made public, because war-plans
never are.

The
origin of this stand-off between the U.S. and Russia goes back to
promises that the West had made in 1990 to the last Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, not
to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia,
and the West’s subsequent violations of
those repeatedly made promises. Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union
and its Warsaw Pact, on the basis of those false assurances from
Western leaders. Thus, Russia is surrounded now by enemies, including
former Warsaw Pact nations and even some former regions of the Soviet
Union itself, such as Ukraine and the Baltic republics, which now
host NATO forces. NATO is interpreting Russia’s acceptance of the
Crimeans’ desire to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia following the
2014 Ukrainian coup,
as constituting a showing of an intent by Russia to invade NATO
nations that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union and of the
Warsaw Pact, such as Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia; and this
is the alleged reason for America’s Operation Atlantic Resolve, and
the steep increase in U.S. troops and weapons in those nations that
border on Russia.